In the latest This Week in Plasma, developers have finalized the feature set for the upcoming Plasma 6.4, meaning development now shifts to the crucial phase of polishing the user interface and squashing any remaining bugs.
The last time we reported on Plasma was back in February, with the release of Plasma 6.3.0, which delivered significant enhancements like improved color accuracy and fractional scaling. It is also worth noting that FreeBSD 14.3 Beta 3 recently shipped with KDE Plasma 6 right on the installation media, simplifying setup for users of that operating system. Now, Plasma 6.4 aims to build on this momentum, particularly with visual and audio refinements, and a keen eye on widget behavior.
There is now a brand new HDR calibration wizard, which should make configuring high dynamic range displays much more straightforward for users.
Alongside this, KWin, Plasma's window manager, gains the ability to enable "Extended Dynamic Range" on compatible displays, simulating HDR by intelligently adjusting the backlight. There will also be an option to limit the maximum color depth on screens that support such a feature, giving users more control over their display output.
Switching to Plasma widgets, the Audio Volume widget is getting a useful tweak; it will now feature small textual headers for audio input and output device sections, making it clearer to distinguish between microphones and speakers.
The Comics widget has also received significant attention, with improvements to its configuration dialog and how it communicates its status, especially when unconfigured or encountering errors.
Even seemingly small details are being addressed, such as Trash widgets now displaying a busy spinner during the emptying process, providing visual feedback for a potentially lengthy operation. A bug affecting large Notifications widgets on the desktop or in very wide panels, which prevented notifications from appearing, has also been fixed.
Plasma 6.4 also refines how it handles system resources and information. System Monitor's Overview page will now include more relevant monitors by default, such as GPU usage and individual disk capacities.
The built-in free space notifier has also received a significant update, as KDE developer Niccolò Venerandi detailed its improvements:
Plasma’s built-in free space notifier now warns you about low free space on any partition, not just
/and/home. It has some intelligence to ignore partitions that are read-only or were mounted in an already mostly-full state, to avoid annoying you into wanting to throw your computer out the window. You can now also configure the percentage at which it starts to warn you.
Beyond Plasma itself, KDE Frameworks 6.15 is set to deliver some useful improvements. One standout tweak involves how executable files are handled: the dialog now presents the "don’t ask again" option much more clearly.
A performance fix will tackle excessive disk I/O from folder thumbnails in applications like Dolphin, and right-to-left language users will benefit from correctly laid out search and password fields.
Plasma 6.4 is set to release around next month.
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